Authors

Ian Davidson

Biography

I live in Wales, where I've been most of my life. I studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Essex and, after working at a variety of different jobs, teach literature and creative writing in the School of English at the University of Wales in Bangor. My poetry has been published in magazines, pamphlets, booklets and full-length collections since the early 1980s.

Work has also been published in a variety of magazines and journals including: Fire, Shearsman, Oasis, Jacket, Poetry Wales, Ecopoetics, Chicago Review, The Gig, The Paper, Masthead and others. My thanks to all the editors.

Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry is forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan in May 2007.

Sample Text

No Way Back

Sun shifts position wind from another quarter blockages the movement of water concentration poor or off centre heart turned over love and sex the worn rock undercut a wash from the west

There is no second chance only the rearrangement of the senses the pull of the heart sings discordant across the generations of the things that move us most; bone, muscle, blood the desire for the perception of beauty the desire for the attainment of beauty

There is no second wind air moving past or the blow to the head and catch as catch can a few words clutched beyond the point of no return he turns and disappears as a figure of speech points to the horizon look at that

I compose myself a series of crotchets minims things I could well do without membership expired and the aspiration to fulfil the task of a better world I arrange organs of speech clear my throat begin to say something

The sea drags shingle over and over the stone in heaps of stone more smooth granite pebbles more marble and what can politics tell me of the soft landscape of the body or the hard wiring of sex or what can landscape

Tell me of the soft politics of the body of the first fix the performed operation as the memory of a warm body etched in the soft tissue as it drips word by word as it tears itself sentence by

Sentence as it storms image through dirty image and the arguments go on in a parody of logic as if the answer is buried in the disorganisation as if once the bits and pieces of the past are finally slotted into place or maybe the

Unexamined life is the better option or the air from an open window and what can intelligence tell me I don't already know as if the tips of the fingers or the mobile lips could lie and in confidence here's the lines from around my eyes

From staring at the setting sun from a westerly coast where the rocks in layers lower themselves into the sea and the guillemots come and the choughs flash their legs or the puffins and I'm still scared to go up high into the lighthouse still and scared to look back

Reviews

In his article on Human Remains and Sudden Movements and At a Stretch in the literary journal Welsh Writing in English, Matthew Jarvis said: 'In the terms set up by Ian Davidson, ecocritics fail to accept their full responsibilities as environmental literary critics unless they pursue an understanding of space and place which takes due account of their 'human remains' and politicised 'sudden movements' ...'

In Chicago Review the critic Eric Elshtain said: 'Deceptively simple, Davidson's poetry is some of the best political poetry this reader has encountered in a very long time.'

Peter Finch, reviewing At a Stretch for the journal Planet says: 'The music is one of dissonance and the feel one of continuous present..... Davidson is a poet of conviction with rare touches of humour, mainly puns, and an agenda of onward shift, connecting the local with the global and "terminal with terminal".'

And Matt Jarvis again in the journal English said of Human Remains and Sudden Movements:'The result is a spectacular mosaic which, whilst clearly demanding close and sustained readerly attention, becomes an exhilarating journey through a variety of half-seen vistas which build upon one another with distinct power as the collection progresses.'

Nate Dorward in the Canadian magazine The Gig says: 'I picked up Ian Davidson's Human to Begin With (Poetical Histories, 1991) from Peter Riley (Books) years ago and was fascinated by its picaresque seriocomedy, pitched somewhere between James Kelman and Tom Raworth... some of [his work] could be called "nature poetry," I suppose -- but a nature poetry completely wired, plugged-in and mediated, verging on the territory of John Wilkinson's contemporaneous Welsh sequence Sarn Helen.'